SUMMER 1976
He rode the crowded bus over the hill and into downtown, holding the hanging strap, his back to the other passengers so as not to create a disturbance. The bus swayed like a ship at sea, what he imagined a ship at sea felt like. Unmoored. Looking up to the wide rearview mirror to find the driver’s eyes before the man quickly looked away.
The other adults on the bus also looked away, down to books or newspapers, a suddenly interesting splotch of gum on the floor. Children, though, stared. They were bold, curious, unashamed. They pointed and called out and asked what he was. The adults yanked them back, scolding them for their rudeness but also pulling them closer, protecting.
On the twenty-seventh floor he pushed the mail cart up and down the rows of desks. The secretaries and paralegals acknowledged him with a nod, but their eyes stayed lowered to their typewriters or phones or fingernails. A few lifted their heads to say, Thank you, while looking at a spot a few inches past the borders of his face.
He existed just to the side of the world around him.
It was as if when he was born he had somehow shifted out of phase. That shift had damaged him. His body was covered with hard, bulging growths, some the size of pinheads, others the size of grapes. As a boy his appearance made him invisible, and this invisibility made him desperate. He wanted to move into the lines of sight, no matter how cruel that sight could be. Twenty years later he still carried that need, but increasingly he felt it tinged with something new—a desire to leave this place and return to where he belonged. He knew it was out there; it had to be. And if he was out of phase, if this current state was a cruel mistake, then a correction was possible. There must be a way to move back through.
The new secretary’s name was Georgia. She had a kind, round face, a dimple pressed into her left cheek. She heard his cart and looked up, just to the side of where he stood.
His mother had called them bumps. Our bumps. She didn’t have them, her skin was smooth and clear, but by naming them this way she tried to share his affliction.
Tanner at seven or eight years old, just out of the bathtub, sitting on the closed toilet, listening to his mother’s gentle singsong. Don’t cry, don’t cry. Her calloused fingertips spreading the cool cream on his face and neck and chest, covering the hard bumps.
The doctor had a long and complicated name for his condition. To Tanner it sounded like the name of a spaceship, a hardened exoskeleton that might take him to another planet, if only he knew where to find the controls.
His mother called them bumps but the children at school said he was made of rocks, throwing some, shouting: Here’s some more.
He loved his mother fiercely but she wasn’t like him, not really. As he grew older he began to resent her attempts to insert herself into his struggle. It wasn’t something they could share. And then there was the other fact, lying between them like a broken bridge neither could cross.
I’m not really your mother. She yelled this once during an argument. Tanner was thirteen, at least a foot taller than her. He didn’t trust his size, what he might do standing so close, so he walked away, deeper into the apartment, but her words brought him up short, like a dog at the end of his chain.
I am and I’m not, she said, quieter now. Ashamed, maybe, of voicing that harsh truth.
You know that, she said.
Did he? Did he remember someone else, another mother, another apartment in another part of the city? An enormous man with a heavy beard taking him from that place? The man was an official of some kind; he wore a name tag with the city seal. Standing in the doorway to Tanner’s bedroom, he told Tanner to empty all the toys from his kindergarten backpack and fill it with clothes. When Tanner was finished, the man looked at the scattering of broken plastic army figures dumped on the floor and said that Tanner might as well take some of those with him, too. All the while the woman shouted from the other room, threatening the man but not moving from where she stood, smoking and trembling with rage.
Riding in the back seat of the man’s car, Tanner looked through the window at streets and buildings and neighborhoods he had never seen, neon signs in incomprehensible languages glowing in the night.
Then here, with the woman he would always think of as his mother. Sleeping that first night in a bedroom she made for him, that he would later realize had been hers. She hadn’t always slept on the couch. The room decorated hastily for a boy she didn’t yet know. Pictures cut out of a TV magazine taped to the walls: Howdy Doody and Davy Crockett and the Mouseketeers. She set a book out for him, The Little Engine That Could. That night she sat beside him and as she read he ran his finger over the bump of the library sticker at the base of the book’s spine.
That first day at the new school the kids stared at him like he was something that fell from outer space. The teacher steered him to the front of the classroom and said, This is Tanner. I want everyone to welcome him and say, Hello, Tanner.
Tanner stared out and the kids stared back and no one said a word.
The after-work crowd in Pershing Square, the simmering onset of a summer evening, cigarettes and bus exhaust, smoke in the air from fires off in the hills. Businessmen and homeless men and mothers with strollers, joggers weaving through, fruit carts, ice cream carts, jangling bells, voices in Spanish, English, Japanese. Conversation and argument and salesmanship, connection, each person, one to the other. Friends, strangers, lovers, families.
Realize that while standing in the center of this crowd you could shout and no one would look at you. You could sing, you could scream. You could explode.
Every morning Tanner bought two mini-bottles of rum at the liquor store by the bus stop. Usually he drank them in the men’s room before his first round of mail delivery, but today he saved them until after lunch, just before heading up to the twenty-seventh floor. The rum gave him the anger and courage to continue holding Georgia’s mail while she nodded and looked off to the side, staring uncomfortably at nothing, her smile quavering like water in a puddle.
Finally she took a breath and moved her eyes to his. He handed her the mail. She smiled again, apologetic, and said, “I’m sorry. Of course. Thank you, Tanner.”
And then he was the one who couldn’t breathe.
A few days later he screwed up enough courage to ask her out for coffee. He didn’t drink coffee, but he was aware that this was what people did when they were getting to know one another. He saw it all over the city—nervous pairs at café tables trying to find common ground. Every time he passed a scene like this he was filled with envy, a desire to hold one end of the uncertain, electric thread that could form between two people. He walked by and they stared and then looked back at each other, and he imagined that for some of them he became that thread, an uncomfortable moment they now shared.
He and Georgia arranged to meet at a coffee shop on their building’s ground floor. Tanner arrived first. He sat at a small table on the sidewalk and looked through the books in his backpack. He always read three or four at a time, carrying them wherever he went. He had learned from an early age that he could step into a book in the same way he could step out of a room. He read a lot of science fiction, and books about religion. There were interesting intersections between the two. A yearning for something else, a refusal to accept the world as it stood. He had begun to form his own theory: that this world was simply a mask hiding another, more beautiful place. The books were fuel to the fire of his ideas. He read Philip K. Dick, Stanisław Lem, Ursula K. Le Guin. He read about John the Baptist and Joan of Arc and Shahid al Thani. The science fiction stories went in many directions but the stories about the prophets all ended the same way.
He heard Georgia’s voice and looked up from his book. She met his eyes and smiled.
They sat outside the coffee shop for hours. She wanted to know all about his reading. He told her about his ideas, and then felt self-conscious and silly but she asked him to continue.
This is fascinating, she said. And you have the most wonderful voice.
He didn’t want to ruin things, but he had to know. Why had she said yes to having coffee with him?
Her face flushed a little, embarrassed.
You just stood there and waited for me to see you, she said. I wish I had that confidence.
Tanner was astonished. He’d never thought of what he had as confidence. He’d thought it was anger. But maybe Georgia was right. Or they were both right, and maybe he could turn what he had into what she wanted to see.
They continued to meet after work for coffee or dinner. She left little notes on his desk in the mail room, index cards folded into complexities that opened to reveal something he had said the night before that she remembered and felt was important enough to show back to him, like a mirror with the horror of sight removed.
Sometimes when they were out together a co-worker passed and made a stunned double take. Normally this would have filled Tanner with embarrassment and rage, but now he stepped forward into those moments. He offered his hand and his name, and they looked at him for the first time.
For years he had checked out books on sex from the library and he had a small collection of pornographic magazines. Twice he had paid prostitutes at a motel by City Hall. These encounters briefly extinguished his physical need but only served to widen another, stronger desire. With the second girl he offered to pay extra if she would lie beside him and run her hands over his body. She accepted, and when he was naked she moved her hands quickly along his chest and shoulders and then stood from the bed and gathered her things and her money and left.
In the dark, on their first night together, Georgia guided him gently, expertly. Another kind of confidence, he thought, following her lead, forgetting the books and magazines and the two women before, feeling like he was floating above his body, as if every touch set more of him free.
He began talking to people at the bus stop, in the mail room, in the offices. Now they listened when he spoke. He told stories from his books. Sometimes the stories were from the accounts of the prophets and sometimes they were science fiction but more often he blended them into something new, and these were the stories people responded to most. When they stood beside him on the bus or by the coffeepot in the break room, leaning in, their eyes on his, Tanner felt what he thought Georgia must feel when she touched him, that power, the ability to lift someone from the falsity of their body. To bring them along into that phase between worlds.